How Do We See Gender and Trans People?
a short essay and video
The most mind-blowing experience of my entire life happened over a six-month period way back in 2001. This was when I began hormonally transitioning. While I was grateful to begin feeling comfortable in my own skin for the first time, that wasn’t quite the mind-blowing part. And while estrogen would transform my body in all sorts of ways over the next few years (which was admittedly pretty amazing), during those first few months the changes were fairly subtle.
Rather, the thing that blew my mind was that, despite those modest changes, I went from having strangers reliably view me as male to having them reliably view me as female in six short months.
As if that wasn’t weird enough, the people who saw me on a regular basis—my friends, co-workers, and other acquaintances—didn’t even notice these changes. This would sometimes lead to multi-person conversations where some people (who already knew me) were convinced that I was male while others (who had just met me) were convinced that I was female, yet neither party picked up on the fact that they were gendering me disparately.
As time went on—and especially once I started presenting more femininely—I would accidentally cross paths with people that I knew before my transition and they would treat me like a total stranger without a trace of recognition. But if I intentionally got together with old friends who knew I transitioned but hadn’t seen me yet, they were always able to pick me out of a crowd and would often tell me that I seemed like the exact same person to them (they were expecting a more dramatic change).
These experiences forced me to question everything that I believed to be true about gender. And I say that as someone who had been questioning gender my entire life!
Some of these anecdotes made their way into my first book Whipping Girl. And in subsequent years, I would often give a talk called I’ll See It When I Believe It that tried to make sense of these experiences. Finally, in my 2022 book Sexed Up—which examines how we perceive and interpret sex and sexuality—I formally forwarded a model that I believe explains all the aforementioned situations (see Chapter 1: The Two Filing Cabinets in Our Minds).
So last year, when discussions about so-called “transvestigation” went mainstream, I found much of the media coverage to be overly simplistic. Many of these stories would lump together “gender critical” and conservative claims that Olympic boxer Imane Khelif was “really a man” with online “transvestigators” who claim that Hollywood celebrities like Henry Cavil and Ryan Gosling are “really women,” even though these groups are clearly viewing gender in wildly different ways (e.g., JK Rowling would never claim that Cavil or Gosling were women).
Furthermore, this framing creates a false dichotomy between these supposedly unhinged individuals who “see trans people everywhere” and the rest of us who presumably see gender and trans people “normally” or “correctly.” But nothing could be further from the truth! I can assure you that you and I probably see gender somewhat differently, especially if you happen to be cisgender.
In fact, over the course of my lifetime—from my childhood years where I was taught to see only boys and girls, to my first interactions with other trans people in my twenties, to my post-transition decades of being immersed in trans communities—the ways in which I see gender have evolved significantly.
So last August, I collected all these thoughts in the essay Why Does “Transvestigation” Happen? On Gendering, Ungendering, and (Mis)Perceiving Trans People. It delves into how we are socialized to see gender, what happens when we become more cognizant of gender and sexual diversity, and why some people seem to get “stuck” in a stage where they compulsively misperceive cis people as trans.
Since this is my most comprehensive take on this complex topic, I decided to turn it into video essay. I started working on it last September, but then life got in the way. But over the last week, I finally put it all together. So here it is!
Here are the chapters with timestamps from the show notes:
0:00 Introduction
2:18 The Two Filing Cabinets Mindset
8:00 Ungendering and “The Look”
17:15 Delusions of “Gaydar” and “Transdar”
23:00 Dismantling the Two Filing Cabinets Mindset (for better or worse)
32:50 Believing Is Seeing
39:40 Other Perceptual Biases (or why trans women, gender non-conforming women, and women of color are especially fucked)
43:53 Conclusion
In addition to being intellectually interesting, I believe this issue is one of the most underappreciated obstacles that trans people face. The fact that most cis people naively presume that they see the world “normally” or “correctly” directly leads to them imagining us as “outliers” at best and “abominations” at worse. We can explain gender and sexual diversity to them until we’re blue in the face, but the real problem is they cannot see that diversity even though it’s all around them!
Encouraging the cis majority to dismantle their Two Filing Cabinets mindset in a “good way” (as I put it in the video) has the potential to help them see that there is no such thing as a “normal” or “correct” gender—we are all simply collections of sex characteristics that vary in all sorts of ways.
Dismantling the Two Filing Cabinets mindset can also help trans people, especially those still in the “questioning” phase. I spent years believing that I’d never be able to transition because there appeared to be an immense chasm separating male from female that seemed nearly impossible to transverse. But it turned out that chasm was entirely in my mind. As I explain in the video, as my gender perception shifted—as I began seeing gender and sexual diversity in all its varied forms—I gradually realized that it was possible for me. I had been stuck on the false notion that I could never be a “real” or “normal” girl, until I was finally able to see that there is no such thing as a “normal girl.”
Anyway, whatever your current state of gender perception is, I hope you appreciate the video—and if you do, please “like” it (which will help boost it in YouTube’s algorithm) and share widely!
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